Agenda: 08-09-2010

Rosglue

Paper Writing

Current draft of paper is in the private repository under trunk/docs/aaai_lfd_tech

Remote Lab Project

Got VPN stuff working.

Meetings are most likely going to be Thursday at 1pm.

Worked with Hayley on understanding rosjs and working on the types of things we will need for an interface/ visualization

Agenda: 08-03-2010

Rosglue

Trevor and I have gone through and done a code review/ some rewrite of ROSglue.

Planned initial release to mailing lists is later this week.

Paper Writing

Started writing document. Much of the writing can spin into the planned ICRA paper. Generated some figures that can be found here:

Remote Lab Project

Fixed the teleop interface to use move_arm interfaces so the robot should actually safely work.

Still need to understand how to

ROSjs stuff

Need to send email to Andrea and Sonja about using ROSjs once we release it and there is documentation

Agenda: 07-27-2010

Rosglue

Working with Rosglue helped us discover/debug several bugs in code that the lab has been developing, including ar_recog, and ar_localizer.

I have seen the agent perform some learning. However a few modifications to rosglue are necessary to handle things like resetting efficiently after the agent reaches the goal.

Trevor and I have a code review meeting on Wed at 10am to go through roglue and catch any problems with the coding so it can be passed to more people.

Once the system is settled a bit more I am going to try testing some continuous action RL code that I have been talking to with one of Rich Sutton's post docs as a test on the PR2.

AAAI

4 page tech report explaining demo needs to be written by an unknown date.

Bosch Follow Up

Got videos of you and Chris teleoping the robot

Need to fix the teleop interface to actually safely work. This requires using a portion of the code base we didn't really discover until 4pm on the last day. It should be a fairly quick once I have time to just sit and do it.

Info for Rosjs session

Agenda: 07-06-2010

RL-Glue ROS

Performing learning experiments in 404. The agent seems to be interacting with the environment properly. Currently the observation space is very very noisy and making it difficult for the agent to learn. I am working on checking how I use ar_localizer to see if this is what is causing problems and also catching any bugs I can find through lots of testing.

AAAI

Working on getting the demos polished up and video taped. Video of demos will go up onto either flickr or youtube.

Agenda: 06-29-2010

RL-Glue ROS

Works with known RL-Glue agents

Working on getting an example of a learning video. Once a simple example works and is filmed I plan to announce to ros users and the rl mailing list. The goal for this is the end of this upcoming weekend.

AAAI

AR people following

outdoor people following

Forms of teleop

Wii gesture

iCreate outdoors

Ar gesturing on Nao

Nao Mirroring

Web interface demo

API demo, bump and go in java script in the web browser

Web teleop

Ar localization and block visualization in the space

How many computers can we reasonably carry?

All demos at once? Or a demo schedule?

Naos will overheat. We might want to set up set times for certain demos that involve the Nao.

Do we need any visuals in terms of signs or posters or videos.

Maybe a longer willow style video that plays when people aren't around.

Putting together the short talk

Setting up Visit to Bosch

July 19-23

Agenda: 06-22-2010

RL-Glue ROS

Most of the major coding is done and I'm testing with different pieces of code

Currently running into a bug with one of the Rl-Glue agents but code is working with another

Setting up Visit to Bosch

July 19-23

Agenda: 06-15-2010

RL-Glue ROS

Created python controller

Controller reads in specification from yaml files

Currently working on the action interface and working out some problems with the reward interface

Success!!! Code automatically subscribes to messages provided in the yaml file and then transfers them into RLGlue approved format.

AAAI Competition

Sent in that quad chart

Filled out paper work so we are all set

Travel arrangements are made.

Agenda: 06-08-2010

RL-Glue ROS

Started working on the more general code idea that Trevor and I worked out

Will outline the changes and describe the soon to be released framework next week

Code Release

I updated and cleaned a lot of Sam's code. I think there needs to be some major revising before this code can go out. We need to decide how much of a priority this is. I'd like it to be around for the AAAI demo and know what needs to be done. It's all just a matter of time.

Code Release

Agenda: 05-25-2010

RL-Glue ROS

Worked on RL-Glue ROS driver for icreate that uses position information published by Chris's recent stuff.

PR2 Simulator Progress

Asked about 3D-Studio Max. No one seems to have it.

Took video of Alex and Gal.

Thinking about the Big Picture

What is the high level story we want to tell that the demo will support?

The idea we had originally discussed was to do large scale experiments with lots of data and lots of user demonstration. Our original pitch was that we don't know what people want robots to do and that giving many people access to a robot in an interesting domain would allow us to being to not only discover what people want robots to do but also let robots learn how to do this. I had been focusing on some type of kitchen domain because that seems like a place where people would actually be interested in interacting with a robot and having it do tasks.

If we are preplanning a task then I am assuming that this is no longer the story we're interested in telling. I guess the story will be something more like the typical LfD/ learning story. I

Other Things I did or are on My Plate

Started brainstorming what we should do for the AAAI demo

Is anyone else going to come down to AAAI with me for the LfD challenge?

This group is doing stuff that is somewhat similar to our group. One of the post docs did a Spatio Temopral Spectral Clustering paper recently. It might be good for the group to be aware of what is going on in this group.

This paper looked at multi-agent RL and how optimizing an agents own reward function can be good for the group.

To Teach or not to Teach? Decision Making Under Uncertainty in Ad Hoc Teams

I think the premise of this paper is what is most interesting for the group. The premise is that in some situations you get non-homogeneous teams of robots that must interact as a group. This paper basically looks at if a robot is more capable than the rest of the group when should it execute less optimal policies to help other agent perform better so that the group performs well as a whole

This paper is somewhat like George Konidaris's skill chaining paper. It's however in a planning domain. Peng does similar stuff to the stuff I worked on for my dissertation except in a planning situation. This paper has some human interaction in it because he requires sampling a set of states and then shows how a human can help with this.

After I get some type of more reasonable environment in the sim I would really like to focus on sensing since I feel it is one of the major bottlenecks to do any real experiments. This may be because it's the thing I understand the least well about the PR2 in Simulation currently.

I met with Jesse and we talked about what he's been doing with Hbase and the way he is envisioning it. Additionally we discussed formatting the videos.

Thinking about the Big Picture

What is the high level story we want to tell that the demo will support?

The idea we had originally discussed was to do large scale experiments with lots of data and lots of user demonstration. Our original pitch was that we don't know what people want robots to do and that giving many people access to a robot in an interesting domain would allow us to being to not only discover what people want robots to do but also let robots learn how to do this. I had been focusing on some type of kitchen domain because that seems like a place where people would actually be interested in interacting with a robot and having it do tasks.

If we are preplanning a task then I am assuming that this is no longer the story we're interested in telling. I guess the story will be something more like the typical LfD/ learning story. I

Other Things I did or are on My Plate

Started brainstorming what we should do for the AAAI demo

Is anyone else going to come down to AAAI with me for the LfD challenge?

Agenda: 05-11-2010

RL-Glue ROS Progress

Helped discover bug in some RL-Glue Learning Code

Modified the RL-Glue/ROS iCreate driver to use Chris's new localization from AR-Tags

Currently working on modifying the driver to be more intuitive

Modified the RL-Glue/ROS project graph

PR2 Simulator Progress

Student Presentations happened last week

Hojoon has been working on updating the information to add items to the simulator

Will work on getting kitchen in the simulator next week

Videos: I'm going to add the information about what we want the videos from the class to look like to the wiki under the class information.

Other Things I did or are on My Plate

Agenda: 04-27-2010

PR2 Sim Drink Serving Progress

I spent the majority of this week thinking about perception. I've been working on documenting what I've been looking at here: Internal:Sensing in Simulation.

Basically there are several things available in ROS. An rf_detector (object detection using random forests) which is still in the sandbox, openCV tools, and the point cloud library. I've been working through the point cloud library since that is what they are using at the class they are teaching in Stanford. I ran into some problems but I'm hoping that if I carefully go through the tutorial that I can get something somewhat working.

We filmed Alex's joystick controller with both the Nao and the PR2. I helped Jesse get his code more generalized to that other people can use it.

Additionally today I worked with Gal on his teleop controller. I helped him get the base to lower and raise incorporated into his code. I think this gives us the ability to teleop (through the keyboard) most of the functionality of the PR2.

Hojoon put a tray into the sim, I'm working on fixing it up so that the physics look more realistic and we're working on finishing up putting ar tags on the walls.

Much of this finally came together late today. I am going to work on trying to video this and put it up on Flickr later today.

Other Things I did or are on My Plate

Bob Full demo - I think the demo went ok but not great unfortunately. They were late getting to us and things were somewhat rushed due to the short schedule. Bob didn't seem to know much about what the lab was doing so we tried to give him a highlight of stuff we've been doing and the basic philosophy of the lab. His talk was excellent and very interesting.

Javier's talk is scheduled.

ICDL reviews - I am finishing the last one tonight

Finished the poster for AAMAS

Agenda: 04-20-2010

PR2 Sim Drink Serving Progress

Thinking ahead to experiments we want to do in June I have some questions I am working on answering. The first is what type of features we need and what, if any, additional sensing needs to be done given the richer sensor space of the PR2. The second question is when do we want to leverage certain robot capabilities and when do we want to learn certain things. One specific thing is that the PR2 had an IK in at least limited situations. Do we want to leverage this and if so when and how?

The group is working on 3 different types of teleoperation.

Teleoperating the PR2 using ar-tags - collaboration with Jesse's group

Challenges we ran into: the simulator uses simulated time. The camera used to view the ar-tag being moved by the human runs in real time.

Sam is currently implementing a bridge that is required to communicate between two roscores that are running, one for the simulator one to communicate with the camera. Hopefully this will let us get around the time issues.

Initial results moving have been shown. We're having issues with the IK, it seems to not respond to some messages and we're not sure why.

Teleoperating the PR2 using the Nao - collaboration with Jesse's group

This may also require a similar interface to deal with the time issue.

Filmed video of this working and added it to the Flickr repository

After some testing Jesse and I talked and he refined the approach and changed some of the joint mappings.

Alex's joystick teleoperation:

Alex demoed a test version of this and has made some requested changes. We will be filming this later on Monday and will add this to the repository.

Other Things I did or are on My Plate

Javier's talk is scheduled.

ICDL reviews - Did one read through the papers this weekend.

Accepted the review for the ML Journal.

Working on a poster and talk for AAMAS - Initial draft of slides are done.

WiML Stuff: About to release a survey to measure impact of workshop

Talked with Chris and Aggeliki about what the visualization and long term demos for the MRF framework

Journal on my dissertation work: This is basically on hold until June.

Skill Learning Paper

Working on writing up the Introduction, Motivation, and Methodology section so I can send these parts off to get high level critiques on the general value of this paper to the community

Have a fairly complete related work section already

Decided on an additional experiment that should make this more "sell-able"

The code needs more work than I'd anticipated but I made a lot of progress on this yesterday so I'm not too behind and can hopefully get at least baseline learning results this week.

Agenda: 04-12-2010

PR2 Sim Drink Serving Progress

The group is working on 3 different things currently.

Teleoperating the PR2 using ar-tags - collaboration with Jesse's group

Challenges we ran into: the simulator uses simulated time. The camera used to view the ar-tag being moved by the human runs in real time.

Sam is currently implementing a bridge that is required to communicate between two roscores that are running, one for the simulator one to communicate with the camera. Hopefully this will let us get around the time issues.

Teleoperating the PR2 using the Nao - collaboration with Jesse's group

This may also require a similar interface to deal with the time issue.

Gal is talking to Jesse about how his interface can be used to do this.

Reaching for a blob which corresponds to an object

Currently I've gotten blob finding happening for both images. I'm working on finding the position the robot should reach to from the two sets of blobs. This has been a bit tricky due to not knowing how to use the simulator amazingly well. Specifically how to get the measurements needed for simple 3D vision stuff